ABSTRACT

Such language, according to Benjamin, need not be verbal; it can just as easily be visual. In “Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Benjamin emphasizes the city’s particularly visual nature at the time, and the ascendancy of urban spectacle as a dominant mode of viewing and understanding the world. He cites Balzac’s observation that “the great poem of display chants its many-colored strophes from the Madeleine to the Porte-Saint-Denis” (qtd. in Benjamin 146). In “The Flaneur,” Benjamin finds support for this idea in Eduard Fuchs’s discussion of “the colossal parade of bourgeois life,” which, he claims, originated in France: “Everything passed in review…. Days of celebration and days of mourning, work and play, conjugal customs and bachelors’ practices, the family, the home, children, school, society, the theatre, types, professions” (qtd. in Benjamin 36).